More Than a Daydream. Few songs are as beloved, or as instantly recognizable, as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Voted the number one song of the 20th century, it's the kind of tune that feels timeless and innocent, a wistful daydream sung by a farm girl from Kansas. But its origin story is far heavier than its melody lets on.
Dark Clouds Gathering. The song was written in 1938 by two Jewish songwriters, Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck) and Yip Harburg (born Isidore Hochberg), both children of Jewish immigrants who'd fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. As the two men sat down to write it, dark clouds were already gathering over Europe, years into a growing nightmare.
Since 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had stripped German Jews of their citizenship, and by 1937 Jews were being fired from their jobs and shut out of public life entirely. Then, in November the following year, Kristallnacht, the night of shattered glass, erupted, shattering any remaining illusion that Jewish life in Germany and Austria had a future.
Haunting Omens. Arlen and Harburg had family and community ties to that world, and they were writing at the exact moment its fate was becoming horrifyingly clear. Whether consciously or not, that dread and longing found its way into their lyrics, and many have since heard in them the ancient Jewish prayer for a return home, dressed up as a Kansas farm girl's daydream. In a chilling coincidence neither man could have possibly intended, the bridge of the song places its narrator over the rainbow, "high above the chimney tops," a line that, in hindsight, carries a haunting weight given what the chimneys of Europe would soon come to represent.
Echoes of Babylon. That longing is nothing new. It's ancient, woven into the collective Jewish memory itself. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, as we remembered Zion" was written some 2,500 years earlier, during the Babylonian exile. Arlen and Harburg were, in a sense, singing that same ancient song again, this time from a homeland in Germany where they were no longer welcome.
Exiled from our homeland, we endured pogroms, expulsions, and genocides across the centuries. We were resilient, but we were also passive. History happened to us. As the perpetual strangers in a strange land, we couldn't properly defend ourselves. We could only try to survive to see another generation. Mercifully, after the unthinkable under the Nazis, our prayers to come home were finally answered.
The Lionhearted. The Lion in The Wizard of Oz sought courage, only to discover he had it within him all along. The Lion of Judah represents that same awakening. We always possessed the strength, but Zion is the heart that gives us the power to claim it, to use it, and to fight for our people and our dignity.
The Rainbow Covenant. Imagine the desperation of those past generations. If only they'd had something like Dorothy's ruby slippers, just a simple click of the heels to carry them over the rainbow and back home. Fittingly, the rainbow itself is a deeply Jewish symbol. In the book of Genesis, it's the sign of HaShem's covenant with Noah after the flood, a promise that no matter how dark things get, destruction will never again have the final word. It's a symbol of hope and renewal, the very same clouds that gathered over Europe finally breaking to reveal it, which makes it the perfect image to arc over a homeland reborn.
It's remarkable that just a decade after this song was written, and after the Jewish people's worst fears were realized, "dreams that you dare to dream really do come true." There is indeed no place like home, and for the Jewish people, that home is Israel. No longer passive victims, we are finally the agents of our own destiny.
This shirt celebrates that transformation. We yearned for thousands of years. We finally came home, and we're never leaving.
Go Deeper
Check out Simcha Jacobovici's piece in The Times of Israel.
To grasp the emotional power this song held for people alive during these dark times, here's a deeply moving video of a holocaust survivor going over the lyrics.
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